094: Sean Lara – Your Go To Simple Lighting Solutions & Low-Cost Marketing Hacks!

Absolutely. And one of the big things I tell people is use the KISS method. Have you ever heard the KISS method? Yeah, okay. It stands for keep it simple, stupid. And that’s really what I try to tell a lot of the students and photographers that I’m teaching is it’s really easy to want to buy all this complicated lighting equipment and try to light a scene with three or four lights and just do all this complicated stuff. But honestly, all you really need to get started to do a lot of what I do, for example, is just one light. A lot of the portraits you see in my portfolio, I made with just one flash and that’s it.

So we’ll stick to environmental portraits because sometimes it’s really hard to convince a bride to hike up the side of a mountain in her wedding dress and heels when it’s 20 degrees outside and it’s snowing and yada, yada. So the big thing that I always tell people is, I mentioned this a little bit earlier at the beginning of this, but try to find clients that really believe in you and your work and resonate with you. So for example, if I was a photographer in New York City and I had a bunch of photos of brides and grooms in the middle of the city with tall buildings in the background in my portfolio, I’m not going to approach those same couples and be like, “Okay, you ready to go hike onto the top of a mountain?” So you need to be able to attract those like-minded individuals, which is super important because you want to be able to get these couples on board with what you’re going to do.

So once you’ve found your ideal client, regardless of what segment of the industry you’re in, that’s super important, is finding your ideal client and finding your niche. In the example of environmental portraits, the big thing for me first to a successful portrait is finding the location, obviously. So I do spend a lot of time researching locations before my wedding day, before the engagement photo shoot, family photo shoot, whatever that might be. So I generally will like to try to find places that are easy to get to, again, because a lot of my couples are wearing big wedding dresses and I can’t ask them to do all this crazy hiking on the day of their wedding. Most of the photos you see in my portfolio are all real couples on the wedding day and I only have sometimes an hour at the very most to take photos of them.

So location is everything. I use a few tools to find locations. So for example, I will use Google Earth, if you are familiar with that web-based program, to help find locations. I’ll also go off-roading sometimes, I’ll do some adventures in my off-road vehicle to see if I can find some really cool, accessible locations. So that’s the big thing for me there is just finding the location. And then once you have that, there’s so many other elements to create a successful photograph, such as my composition, how do I incorporate the landscape in my photos, my light placement in relation to the sun. So for example, if I’m lighting a portrait when it’s sunny outside, I’ll try to mimic the direction of the light from the sun to make it look natural.

And then of course, my pose is another thing as well that is super important too because a lot of times when you’re using flash, if you have your couples pose incorrectly, you can get some awkward shadows. So that’s something I’m always trying to keep in mind as well. And then of course, just my exposure settings, what we talked about a little bit earlier, I want to make sure everything works, my highlights are properly exposed in the scene, I’m not killing the detail of my shadows too much, so there’s just that nice balance and that finesse that takes a little bit of time to develop and figure out how to work around.